Personally I despise the "English like" syntax of languages like xtalk or AppleScript. Computers are not to the point of being able to understand the infinite variations humans use to construct the same message. "Natural language" systems usually end up being more demanding in terms of syntax because it's not clear, at a glance, which combinations will work and which will not or why. On top of that they are needlessly verbose.

The .NET languages are not "Englishified" in this manner. But they do automatically coerce types when and where they can. I have mixed feelings about this because in theory a strict language like RB catches more errors at compile time. And I can think of examples where automatic type coercion could lead to very subtle and painful bugs. But in practice I find that I prefer the language to do this work for me where it can, and I haven't run into those painful bugs (yet).

Types involve more work in RB. On the flip side, the .NET framework is often excessively complex and deep, with too many nested objects and long .Method call chains. The RB framework is nice and compact in comparison.